On Sunday Javier and I will head out to an ancient dry lake bed in the middle of the Nevada desert, participating in the Burning Man arts festival. I’m reprising below an article I wrote for Trinity News this summer as a way of giving some context for the trip, as I hope to blog daily from the site, noticing the anthropology and spirituality of people making individual and collective meaning (and a lot of fire). If you DON’T hear from me next week it means only that the fragile (and surreal) wi-fi links to the outside world have failed me, but I’ll be sure to come back with a full account after Labor Day. 

Now here’s some background on why I put myself through 110-degree heat, freezing cold, and blasting wind/dust storms...

Burning Man is a sort of extreme summer camp, as 50,000 people survive the elements to create a tent city for a week that features large-scale art, free-spirited personal expression, and of course, fire. I have said only semi-jokingly to colleagues that I think every seminarian should be required to go to Burning Man to study liturgy. As important as it is to learn the Prayer Book rubrics, it is more important to learn the rubrics of the human spirit and at this festival an important human pulse is very close to the surface. At Burning Man I have learned more about how people need to participate in liturgy to be engaged by it than I have anywhere else.
One of the annual large-scale constructions is a “temple” built outside the city. It houses no god and is ruled by no creed, but is rather an open space where people bring their intention. From it they watch the sun rise and set, and they make every corner and inch of it their own. They bring mementos: photos of lost loves and estranged kinships, little relics of personal transformations in all shapes and sizes. They write on the temple: prayers of release and forgiveness, psalm-like prayers of anger and loss, messages of connection and blessing to those who have passed beyond the veil. By the end of the week the temple has become a visible pile of prayer, a sort of collective dumping ground of spiritual exchange.

At the end of the week, most every art installation that can be burned is set ablaze, including the namesake of the festival. “The Man,” an effigy that signifies anything or nothing, is burned with great pyrotechnic fanfare out of sense of “tradition,” honoring the first combustion twenty-some years ago by a guy and his buddies on a San Francisco beach for some reason long since forgotten.

The temple is burned the following night. Without any of the fanfare and pyrotechnics of the previous night, the remaining 30,000 participants gather around this colossal structure in the desert. Everyone initially has his or her own idea of how this burning should be ritualized: some try to get others singing, some sit, some stand. Those sitting shout at those standing, those standing shout back that they have every right to stand. Sound familiar? Eventually, and seemingly instinctively, the entire crowd settles down to silence. Thirty thousand people in open-ended silence is quite a sound.

When the temple is lit, without any fanfare, the entire crowd sits in complete and uninterrupted silence for about twenty minutes, listening to the crackling of the temple and its contents. When I have turned to look back at the lit-up faces, many of them are wet with tears.
Very few of these people at Burning Man would call themselves religious. Most have fled the churches because of what they perceive as a toxic blend of hypocrisy and absence of soul. But they have not fled meaning. Watching their hunger and engagement assures me that the human soul is still adept at expressing its awareness of the divine. Rob it of one language and it will quickly create another, not always healthily: the language of war and of nationalism and victimization is religious language.

In the fourth century, as souls grew sick of the decadence of the Imperial cities, a few brave ones removed to the desert. Soon others came out by the thousands to join them, and the Christian monastic movement was born. Something similar is happening today. Where I live, in Lower Manhattan, the polls say that only 17% of the neighborhood’s residents are interested in spirituality of any type (way below the national average). These people have discarded religion, and even spirituality, but they are starving for meaning. Liturgy that does what it does because that’s what it does will not attract them; it barely attracts me.

Our rector, Jim Cooper, likens good liturgy to the kind of Broadway play that, when you step back out into the street afterwards, has charged the world with color and new meaning. It is an event that reveals and transforms, allowing participants to touch something below the surface, some deep meaning that makes the ordinary luminous and liminal.

Of course a ritual repeated weekly will not draw out the same emotional fireworks of a one-time catharsis, but both should have the same invitation to go deep; both open a door. The keys to that door are intentionality and participation. That’s why the faces at Burning Man are wet with tears. All the people prayed for are there in the flames. They have been brought there by the people present, who are also there in the flames. It is a moment of profound communion and release. When ritual and tradition are regularly and deeply engaged, they become heavy with meaning, dense and complex. When ritual and tradition are not reflected upon, but maintained and recited, they become heavy in another way — like the drag of barnacles on a ship’s hull.

Without intention and reflection and occasional reform, liturgy’s meaning is increasingly found in its comfortable repetition so that the meaning becomes the repetition. It becomes an anesthetic to life rather than a concentration of life’s meaning. Then we try to protect liturgy from change, and when we succeed it grows old and brittle, not resonantly ancient and alive.

I have logged enough hours in ordained ministry to confirm that the preparation of our rituals does not get the attention it deserves. Liturgy and preaching courses in seminaries are some of the first to be cut when budgets tighten. And I have worked long enough in parish ministry to see that much of our liturgy is designed to comfort, protect, and preserve, rather than provoke encounter and transformation. My best illustration is the true story of encountering a sign on a highly polished brass railing leading up the steps to the communion rail that read: “Please Do Not Touch the Railing.” I’ve never heard it said better than by Annie Dillard:

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

When the temple burns at Burning Man on that last night, the waking god draws people out to where they can never return. People are surprised by their tears and don’t quite know what to do with them. This might not be a sustainable solution to spiritual hunger, but it’s a good barometer of it.

At Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, located provocatively at the head of Wall Street and on the lip of the rapidly developing Ground Zero, we feel that hunger all around us. We are beginning to talk about growing the congregation with renewed effort, and as we do I’m focusing our liturgical work especially on those two keys I mentioned: intentionality and participation. We built our Easter Vigil this year with generous doses of both, and people’s faces and reflections afterward made me think that the waking god had drawn us out to where we could never return. It felt a little like Burning Man.

I took this photo this morning from my office. It’s a view to the hole almost-formerly known as Ground Zero, which has been a construction zone for years now. Not everything is being constructed new; some buildings are still being torn down. The damaged Deutsche Bank, (left), is coming down story by story, week by week. The progress is too slow to notice daily, but those coming back after summer vacation will notice another floor gone. And the opposite is true as well: World Trade Center #1 is up to about 25 stories now, but it seems to happen when we’re not looking. And the memorial fountains are slowly starting to take shape.

This is NOT a good neighborhood to live in if you want things tidy. We have long gotten used to orange cones and construction tape, to jackhammers and protective scaffolding over many building entrances, to ambitious tourists trying to get a shot of the guts of the site over or through the fence, and scrapping with the traffic control cops and site monitors about where they are allowed to stand. It won’t end anytime soon.

The same is true of the arena of debate surrounding the neighborhood. Cordoba House (Park51) is the hot topic now —a moderate sufi Muslim community center that is slated to be built a few blocks away. This discussion is anything but moderate, and the amount of disinformation and vitriol being smeared around demands our best effort at mining what religious toleration and reconciliation means, and guarantees that this site will be untidy for many years to come.

But for me this construction zone is a sort of back door icon of God’s action. Every morning during the summer I have said my prayers from the rooftop of my building, which also overlooks this tangle of deconstruction and construction. It looks a lot like my life. So many structures that appeared to be permanent have revealed themselves to be temporary; new things are hinted at but have not yet appeared; in a few places there are definitive signs of purposeful growth. It’s not at all tidy but it’s very much alive. It’s not a good place to expect clean surfaces, but it’s an amazing place to notice vitality.

I’ll be bold enough to expand the image to the church we inhabit: it’s certainly plenty messy right now. Some see decline and some see advance. A lot of things that looked permanent are passing away; some of the bloated sprawl is “right-sizing.” Some things that looked like they had collapsed are re-sprouting in new form. And of course half of the people think the other half are wrong, but somehow they/we have to figure out how do do this thing together. This vital untidiness is going to be with us for a long time so we’d better learn to thrive in it, or move to a quieter suburb.

For my part, I’m loving living in lower Manhattan. There are quieter districts, but none more interesting!

Ushers are God's stand-ins and ambassadors. That's what I told our usher team at their meeting after church last week. I had told the security guards a similar thing a couple weeks previously, and I believe it more strongly each week that I watch visitors walk through the door in church. While my attention might be focused on the refinements of the liturgy and music as a way of focusing God's message of reconciliation and welcome, many visitors may have already made up their minds about what we preach through our behavior, based on how they were met at the door.

The security guards noticed that it's so easy to slip toward a curt "Sorry were closing!" or "Take off your hat," or "No flash!" especially at Trinity where nearly three million people pass through the door each year, hoards of them doing something that the sign says they shouldn't --talking on their cell phone, wearing a hat, carrying a Coke. And the Usher team reported that somewhere along the line they had been instructed to withhold bulletins from visitors who were not planning to stay for services.

You, I told them, because you are standing at the threshold and are the first person people speak to when they enter, hold a huge amount of spiritual power. Because you are wearing the badge, people will project onto you all the assumptions and expectations they have gotten about God before they walked in that door, positive and negative. How you respond will either challenge or reinforce those assumptions. How you tell them to take their hat off, and how you by your actions show them they are welcome, may make all the difference in their experience of Trinity, and even of divinity.

My own case in point: awhile back I attended a big wealthy church in midtown Manhattan. I was traveling directly to the airport from the service, so I had brought a carry-on with me to the service and was dressed in casual traveling clothes. As I climbed the steps to the church an usher was setting out a sign on the steps. He looked at me with narrowed eyes, and I explained: I'm not a tourist and I'm coming to church, I just have to go to the airport from here. The usher looked me over, still without a word, and then cocked his head toward the door and turned away. I was surprised in the moment how deep this silent message hit me in the gut. I felt misunderstood and misread, and most of all I felt like I conspicuously didn't belong. I also felt angry, and I pushed on.

I got to the top step and encountered another usher. This one immediately turned to me and said, smiling, "Good morning. Here I'll take that and put it in this closet here and you can pick it up after the service." I sensed that he had a directive that prohibited luggage from being brought into the church, but the way he approached me made his No feel like a Yes, and I felt so welcomed by him that day that I'm still telling this story to you now.

In both instances I marveled at the strength of my reaction: how exposed and rejected -- and then welcomed I felt, and it showed me once again how vulnerable and sensitive we humans are, especially at thresholds to sacred precincts. Those thresholds are powerful places, and those who keep them hold extraordinary power.

This fall at Trinity we're going to mount an increased focus on what happens to a visitor during those critical three minutes that they are entering the church and what happens to them during the three minutes after the Dismissal. I'll post here what we're learning, and I encourage you, at Trinity or your own home church, to stand near the door and watch what kind of powerful little movements and exchanges are happening at the threshold, and then put out your hand...

Last Sunday I skipped church. That in itself was no big deal. I had skipped it the week before too, out on the potato boat in Peru. But this time I was in town, and a block away from Trinity, and I very intentionally decided not to go. Javier and I talked about going to another church in Harlem, and my habitual Sunday practice is to be in church so I felt the pull, but something in my instinct said Stay Away. Read the Paper. Take a Walk. I felt uneasy breaking my rhythm and habit, but once a year I do that – make sure my vacation includes two consecutive Sundays off, so that the break in my rhythm can better show me why that rhythm is valuable to me. It felt good to feel the hunger.

I talked to someone this past week who was wondering why they bother to go to church at all. They didn't see the benefit in their lives. They still had all the same problems and challenges they had a year ago. I was careful not to answer their question but to let it stand. It's a good one. Why do we show up at all?

It used to be that many people filled the church pews because of what other people would think of them if they didn't. Mainline churches burgeoned with nominal Christianity built on social protocol. Now it's the reverse: in New York City, and even more strongly in San Francisco where I lived previously, the street-side sentiment is: What is wrong with you that you would choose church over brunch?!

In a land of instant everything, incremental practice isn't remotely in vogue, which is partly why numbers in churches are generally down. But one of the reasons Liturgy is powerful is that it is habitual. We talk about it being transformational, but the other chemicals that create that combustion are time and repetition. Neither of those things is very dramatic. Most of the time we don't notice anything really transforming in us.

But once in awhile, when the sermon stops us in our tracks, or when we hear a standard phrase in the liturgy as if for the first time, or when the music speaks our soul's language, or in my case, when we feel the simple hole in our routine and miss its orienting steadiness, the ritual shows a glimmer of its power.

To get to those glimmers though, one must log hundreds and even thousands of hours of practice – of just showing up. The transformation Liturgy offers is one that requires sometimes-exasperating amounts of cultivation. This is not glamorous, but the fruit is so reliable and so sustaining – it's a guarantee as sure as the difference between an industrial-farm store-bought tomato and the beefsteak tomato from your garden.

And then occasionally, one gets those glimmers by NOT showing up. I recommend the practice: Play hooky for a week or two this summer. Do it to discover more intentionally why it is that you show up at all.

I am writing from Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America and highest navigable lake in the world, on the Peru/Bolivia border. It's my idea of vacation: a heavy dose of discovery and exploration even though I usually need a few days to recover when I get home.

The tiny island we've been staying on is remote --it has no roads or permanent electricity, and yet it is the eye of the Inca origin myth: the two peaks on the island are called Pachatata and Pachamama, Father and Mother Earth respectively, the hills of the sun and the moon.

Even though Inca religion is not my own, as sunset drew near my husband Javier and I found ourselves climbing up toward the peak of Pachatata, almost by instinct. It had the feel of pilgrimage.

At 14,000 feet, even putting on a sweater could leave me hard of breath, so a thousand-foot climb exacts a price. But nothing short of reaching the peak would do for us, no matter how many rests we had to take along the way. And if a man with a mule had offered us a ride I think we would have still chosen to walk. The journey was part of the experience of arriving at the top. Struggle is part if the satisfaction of arrival.

After the sun set, the pull of Pachamama across the valley became too strong to resist so we trudged our way to that peak as well, sitting with the dark expanse of the vast lake below us and grey band of the Milky Way rolling out across unfamiliar constellations shining brighter than I've ever seen them. It was hard to believe New York skyscrapers even existed. We sat there feeling very small but very connected.

I can't live in the luminous and thin air of Lake Titicaca, and I'll be home among the skyscrapers in a week, but as I write this on the freight boat idling its way back to the mainland, eating potatoes for lunch off of a pile that the laborers have invited us to join them in sharing, I feel that same sense of connection from the top of the mountain, something I can't put words to but still feel in my bones.

I guess that's one of the challenges of this vacation/journey/pilgrimage/life: to keep connecting the dots to make sense of how climbing the mountain of the gods and eating spuds with strangers (on a Sunday morning as it happened) feels like the same moment of Communion.

So this one’s hot out of the oven:

This past Sunday I took the role of what we informally call the “Marshal” at the St. Paul’s liturgy. (By way of context-setting, our ‘Marshal’ is the person who fills a diaconal-type role and basically moves the liturgy forward --making sure the people are cued for what’s coming next, that other lay leaders like readers and intercessors are prepped and in their places, etc. The role is filled by trained lay people, and we find that it actually strengthens the role of the Presider, and distributes the work of leadership more broadly.) 

During our Welcome and Announcements, led by the Marshal, we invite people to shout out the city or country they are from (since 60-80% of our congregation is traveling from around the world). We kept finding that people we knew were visitors were holding back, were timid about using their voice. People seated in the chairs for worship were actually more timid than the people viewing the 9/11 exhibit (we have two “congregations” in the room at the same time!) and we were trying to figure out how to coax them into participation without putting them on the spot with an “anyone visiting… anyone…” reminiscent of the altar calls of my youth. 

So anyway, this past Sunday I stepped into those Marshal shoes to explore this challenge from the inside. I had already learned previously that standing in the middle of the room and offering the invitation with an outstretched hand and turning around the room like it was a clock dial got better results than throwing the invitation open to the whole room at once, but I was a third of the way around the room when something new clicked:

I had been avoiding eye contact with the visitors, out of deference for their possible wish to remain private. But then I caught someone’s eye in the exhibit and they immediately spoke up. I caught the eye of the next visitor and the next, and they all spoke up. A few remained silent and I just kept moving, offering my eyes to everyone in the room in turn. The communication as we looked at each other was not full of schoolroom fright (“Is he going to call on me next?!”) but of anticipation (“Oh, It’s my turn now!”) I was astonished and delighted by how easy it clicked, and how I had been studiously avoiding the solution until I stumbled across it by accident. 

I’m telling this story because it taps into several core principles that guide me as I plan liturgy: 

1. Paying attention to those points in liturgy, albeit tiny, where people connect with each other is key; unlock those and you will likely be unlocking deeper places where people are connecting with God. 

2. Discovering something new in liturgy is much more interesting that getting it perfect. I’m far more interested with what’s not quite working than with what is, because that knot holds all this gathered energy that’s ready to be released. (again, the connection to God thing). And often the discovery will be accidental and from an unexpected quarter, caught only if we are paying attention.

3. Giving people direct instructions and letting them make adult choices is more liturgically hospitable than obfuscating politeness: “Shout out where you are from… Welcome!” is better than: “The congregation is now invited to share where you are from, if you feel comfortable.” It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s demonstrably more successful, and it models better Jesus’ own style of “Follow me, (even though it makes you uncomfortable)!”

I’m guessing there are more stories out there: where you found that getting connected to others in liturgy unlocked something deep, or where you discovered something tiny in the liturgy that unlocked something greater, or where an invitation either moved you forward or repelled you. I’d love to hear them!